This specification relates generally to content management in distributed online communities.
The Internet provides access to a great number of forums in which people can exchange information, ideas, opinions, and digital resources of various formats. Examples of these online forums include blogs, digital bulletin boards, online discussion boards, social websites, online gaming sites, online market place, and so on. A user of an online forum can submit content (e.g., questions, ideas, comments, and/or media resources) to a server of the online forum, and the server then provides the submitted content to other users for viewing and/or comments.
A server of an online forum often receives a large number of content submissions from the forum users. In order to better facilitate content viewing by the forum users, the server sometimes categorizes the content submissions under different topics. In addition, the server sometimes also ranks the content submissions in each topic category based on the user feedback received for each content submission. The feedback is provided by the forum users who have viewed the content submission in the form of an approval vote or a disapproval vote, for example. Top-ranked content submissions are optionally provided to other users who have not viewed the content submissions as the most popular content submissions in the topic category.
Sometimes, the server of an online forum also provides selected content submissions to forum users as featured content submissions and invites the users to provide feedback with respect to the featured content submissions. By proactively presenting a content submission as a featured content submission to users, the server can prompt the users to provide their favorable or unfavorable opinions of the content submission, and quickly gather the feedback data needed to determine the popularity of the content submission.